Everyday there's some new revelation about what the NSA can and has been doing.
Most of us sensed it long ago even if we didn't articulate it.
No need to wonder anymore.
There is war being waged against us by those inside the circles (circus?) of government power.
Hand in hand with corporations the land of free becomes a dystopian homeland that would make East Germany blush.

Take that you commie bastards!

We'll show you how freedom really works!

I want my taxes back AND an apology.

(post by introspectionist removed for a serious terms and conditions violation)

Meh, a while back I posted either here or on Fark that I'd seen a demo of this thing's predecessor, fit in a briefcase and the guy read all the
contact info, emails and notes out of every iphone in the place.

I was told how wrong I was because iphones run ios, which was unhackable. Yeah, about that, back then they had a SMS backdoor and another in the
Bluetooth stack. Many other phones do as well.

We let this business get a iron-clad foothold into our lives when we did little or nothing when we first discovered that business' were infecting our
computers and invading our privacy with their "harmless cookies."

By all American standards of old, this is a basic, illegal activity. Period! But we sheeple let them do it to us. Some of us minorly complained at
the time, but not enough joined the chorus and it mushroomed into what we have today.

And today, the government has increased its power that we cannot stop whatever they desire to do to in terms of surveillance. Unfortunately, that
"do as they wish" ability does not stop there. Big Brother is here in ways unimaginable two decades ago. They are overhead, in your vehicle, on
the street, in all manners of buildings and in every communication device you will ever own. It is conditioned control to the highest degree without
us being much the wiser.

Of course. That's exactly what jailbreaking does. It finds an exploit (or multiple) in the iPhone's code, injects its own installation packages and
code to re-assign administrator privileges to all corners of the device.

But now it's not just police or NSA. People now do it to their own phones.. granted then, if you know what you're doing, you can close any other
open exploits in the software and make the phone much more secure.

Isnt it time citizens launch united front and take the NSA to court. In other words sue them for deliberately adding Malware on phones for the
expressive purpose of spying and wanton damage to the users property?

They sound no better or ethical or different than hackers who inject Malware into peoples computers.

Yep, I had an app back in 2003 that would allow me to do this on Symbian devices from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. But that's not the point, the point
now is the fact that it comes "standard" on iPhones. (And I'm surmising they also have it on Android phones.)

This is why I went back to my old Symbian phone(s). I know these things inside and out. I quit using my old iPhone 3GS when I broke the screen, went
over to Android and installed a custom rom. (Voids the warranty, but I trust a custom rom much more than stock rom so it's worth it in my
opinion.)

Quit using my Android phone as my distaste for Google grew. What's next? TV's that come with this built in tech? (Probably already does.) Soon,
no matter where you are you'll never be alone...

It used to be that you had to install an app on the phone first to allow access, but with remotely triggered installs and remote authentication
methods this is now available to any good hacker or CIA types.

Yes, it has but it is also against the law. In fact, the companies who sell this software will refuse to sell it to you if any information is
indicated that you will be using it to spy on ANYONE because they can be held liable for it. Some of these companies will specifically ask you what
you are doing with it. There is usually a short list of acceptable answers to guarantee you a sale. At least, with legitimate companies who are not
underground or black market.

This kind of surveillance *should* be considered illegal, even by the government. However, if enough people don't turn the tide of public opinion and
press government to say it is unacceptable then intrusion into your life will only get worse. Also be aware that EVERY modernized government has this
capability.... Not just the NSA.

"They're" scared/paranoid because they know everyone's talking about them. Although I'm highly against such acts of invasion of privacy, still,
it will not do them any good. The Xbox1 has the same capabilities-At first, Microsoft said that it had to always be on and connected to the internet.
After all the complaints that they got flooded with, Microsoft then changed their decision. Yeah right, I bet they can still watch you through the
Kinect eye any time they want. It's a messed-up world we live in. I think Orson Wells saw it coming.

I remember a day where I got excited about rumors of an open source phone coming to market. Will it ever happen? We could protect our own phones and
get suspect files n coding off. Paying upwards of 500 for iPhones and 800 for large iPhones (iPads) we should demand open source.

Personally, I use an iPod touch as a smart device. I have wifi at home and work, and I don't need 24/7 internet. There are wifi hotspots
everywhere, too. I'm sure it's got exploits too, but at least it's not as accessible as a smartphone, and has almost all the features of an
iPhone. Kind of a compromise, I guess.

I've have considered this with most phones these days. My phone has done some weird things in the past and I have a windows phone.

My question is, how can they monitor all the phones they want when there are prolly 300 million+ phones in the U.S alone?

-SAP-

I actually posted what they do in another thread. Long story short, the NSA collects all metadata from calls while the phone providers are required
to keep a record conversations. Certain call patterns are searched for and if a call matches that pattern in terms of length, conversation parties,
location of one party, and a few other things, they get a court order to obtain the recording of that call. At that point it's listened to by
humans. The number of calls they listen to is pretty low relative to the number of calls made. My quick estimation came to 900 calls/day out of 2
billion total, which an agency with 30,000 employees has the resources to do (3% of the staff would listen to 1 call/day to put it in perspective).

greenday1978
There is indeed plenty of reason to fear what is happening, but there is always a way around it. For instance, look at these terrorist organizations.
With all of our listening technologies, spyware, satellites, and attack drones, these terror cells still manage to stay under the radar and pass
messages. This is a world that we will all live and die in so we'd better start getting used to it. There's nothing to be done at this point. Even
if governments fell, the technology would still be out there for use by some other rising faction.

The reason for this is that nothing we've done has actually made us safer. Remember the phrase "What did we know, and when did we know it?" what came
out of that was essentially that our intelligence service was too big, we had several competing agencies all collecting data but no one was willing to
act on it because the signal to noise ratio was so poor that we couldn't tell of it was legitimate. Over a decade later and untold billions of
dollars spent we've drastically increased surveillance and it brought us no security. In the one act of domestic terrorism since 9/11 we had no clue
what was going on.

That is absolute proof that our intelligence agencies aren't actually making us safer, yet allowing them to do what they're doing does make us a lot
less free.

notquitesure
Rand Paul told some acquaintances of mine some time ago that you could be spied on through your smart phone even if it were turned off.

Chalk another one up, I guess.

This is pretty old information actually. If the device has power going to it, it can be remotely accessed and used. This applies to webcams and mics
in laptops as well as cell phones, tablets, and any other fancy networked device. This is one reason I consider the design of IPhones to be
critically flawed. There's no way for the end user to easily remove the battery.

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